Yard waste, including fall leaves, is picked curbside on your regular garbage day until late November, weather permitting, and is available to all Coralville residences eligible for city trash and recycling services.
What to Do With Fall Leaves
Choose from the following ways to get rid of or use fall leaves:
- Place leaves curbside in Coralville yard waste bags, available at both Coralville Hy-Vee locations (1914 8th Street and 3285 Crosspark Road), Theisen’s (100 Westcor Drive), and City Hall (1512 7th Street) for $1 each.
- Put leaves curbside in your own 33-gallon container with an annual yard waste sticker, available at City Hall for $25.
- Mulch / compost leaves for your own use.
For more information about yard waste pickup, call 319.248.1740.
Fall Leaf Collection Tips
When cleaning up fall leaves, please keep the following in mind:
- Use only Coralville yard waste bags; other bags will not be picked up.
- Loose leaf piles are not collected.
- Don’t place leaves in plastic bags; they cannot be recycled.
- Don’t rake leaves into streets, ditches, or drainage ways. This can plug storm drains, carry lawn pollutants into waterways, blow leaves back into yards, and is not safe for bicyclists and pedestrians.
- Burning leaves is not permitted.
Leaves can be used to improve lawns and decrease the use of harmful fertilizers. To avoid bagging leaves, consider these alternatives:
- Make mulch: mow your yard with the mower bag attached. Partially-shredded leaves can be used as mulch around gardens and landscaped areas, or raked into gardens to decompose over the winter.
- Feed your lawn and reduce the need to bag leaves: mow over the leaves without a mower bag, and let nature turn the leaves into lawn nutrients without harmful chemicals. The mower chops up the dried leaves and grass clippings and deposits them back into the turf.
- Recycle leaves by adding them to compost. Compost, a rich soil product made up of decomposed organic matter like yard waste and kitchen scraps, improves the soil quality of gardens, lawns, trees, plants, and shrubs.
Coralville picks up bagged/canned leaves instead of operating a leaf vacuum program because:
- Coralville's leaf collection program allows for frequent, predictable collection throughout the fall season.
- Vacuum trucks are subject to weather delays and mechanical problems.
- Containing leaves in bags/cans keeps leaf piles where they belong and reduces the amount of leaves in the gutter. Loose leaves raked to the curb can blow back into yards or clog storm drains, obstruct the flow of stormwater runoff, and carry lawn chemicals into waterways.
Original source can be found here.
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